Saturday, October 08, 2005

Bandits of Iqaluit

What a day…

8:15 a.m. – Cathy wakes me up with a “Oh, please you’ve got to be kidding me.” As I debate, in my newly awoken stupor, what she’s talking about, it becomes readily apparent. At this ungodly hour of the morning, our neighbour (not the ones having sex all the time loudly against our bedroom wall) has started playing music. Really, really loud.

And not just any old music. No, they’re playing the soundtrack to Top Gun. Seriously. Top… Fucking… Gun. And not just one of the hits like Take My Breathe Away or Danger Zone. The entire soundtrack. Who the hell still has the soundtrack to this movie 20 years later? And why would you acknowledge this fact to the world by playing it loud? At 8:15 in the morning?

8:45 a.m. I’m seriously considering murder or wondering if I can appeal to a Human Rights Tribunal for cruel and unusual punishment as Danger Zone kicks in for the second time when the phone rings. Cathy gets it. While I’m not part of the actual conversation, I think it went something like this.

Cathy: Good Morning! (No, really. She has a perky voice when answering the phone early in the morning.)
Shipping Company Guy: Hello, I’m looking for Mrs. Welsh.
Cathy: This is she.
SCG: We just wanted to let you know that your sealift came in last night.
Cathy: Brilliant!
SCG: However, there is a problem. Some people broke into your crates last night and there are items missing.
Cathy: Oh, brilliant (Rough translation” “Motherfucker!”).
SCG: So we need you to come down to the beach and identify what might be missing and let us know. And then you need to report that to the police.
Cathy: Ok, we’ll be down shortly.

All of this before 9 a.m. on a Saturday. And I don’t drink coffee.

Actually, it turned out to be not nearly as bad as it could have been. One of the first things they tell you when you have a sealift coming in is to get it as soon as its on the beach, or have it delivered right away. Because if you leave it down there, they will break open the cases and steal stuff.

Don’t ask why there is no security on the beach to prevent them from doing that. It’s just one of those northern things.

However, because they’ve been so backlogged the last week or so, and the case probably came in late, it stayed there over night. We didn’t know it was in until this morning. We’ve been expecting it all week.

So some kids, around 14-17 according to the RCMP, broke into a bunch of cases looking mostly for booze. We didn’t have any shipped up, although there was some tins of tomatoes put in a Grand Marnier box. Apparently they weren’t happy to find tomatoes instead of booze so the cans went flying across the yard.

Oh, and they ate most of my chocolate bars. Bastards. Stupid ones at that. The police caught them pretty quick but, you know, not quick enough to save my chocolate.

The good news in this is that we would have had to spend $120 to have the wooden crates shipped up to the apartment, and then spent a couple of hours breaking them down to take to the dump. Because the crates were damaged, the shipping company would have had to repair them before moving them to us. Instead, they lent us a pick-up and let us load up all the stuff ourselves and transport it back to the apartment. So we saved a lot of money and time, really.

Almost worth the loss of the chocolate, a few cans of pop and some orange juice. Reporting it to the police was comical. We had to report the loss of 17 chocolate bars, 5 cans of pop and a 1L of orange juice. Still, we were told to report it, so we did.

Everything is just about packed away now. Just about every nook and cranny has something wedged in. But I think we’re barricaded away for the winter.

But you know what the scariest part of the day was? When we got back to the apartment with the first load of boxes around 10:30 a.m., the neighbours were still playing the Top Gun soundtrack. Oh my dear lord…

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